Charm and Consequence (Novella) - By Stephanie Wardrop Page 0,4

the door, grateful to be heading anywhere else, even if it is the parking lot behind some other school’s gymnasium to drop off my sister. I can feel Alistair’s owl eyes on us as we walk out the door, and I'm pretty sure it's not the state of Cassie’s soul he's assessing as he does.

When I get home, Tori’s already out on her movie date with Trey and Leigh and Alistair are in the den watching something wholesome, possibly involving hand puppets, on television. For dinner, Mom makes enough spaghetti (with meat sauce) to feed a small nation, and gets so excited when Leigh mentions that the church is planning a Purity Ball for New Year’s Eve that she misses the crucial information that this event involves girls getting rings from their fathers and vowing that they will abstain from sex before marriage.

“So they basically pledge their hymens to their fathers?” I spit out, just to clarify it for my distracted mother. Her excitement abates enough for her to worry out loud, “I’m not sure your father will agree to that,” revealing her uncanny gift for understatement.

I turn to Leigh and ask, “Do boys make the same kind of pledge?”

“No,” Leigh says, hazel eyes dull now, like I’m about to slap her, and I feel sort of bad then.

“Just the girls,” Alistair confirms.

Ignoring him, I ask her more gently, “Are you sure you get a ring, and not a chastity belt?”

Alistair looks at me as if I have just revealed myself to be the town’s biggest slut and not the sad testament to a life of near-purity that I am and says, “I don’t see what is so wrong about a young woman taking her virtue seriously.”

I tell him, “I just don’t see why it’s the girl’s job, entirely. What about a guy’s “virtue”? Why doesn’t a guy have to make a pledge, or control his own loins?”

Alistair wipes his mouth with the white cloth napkin. “He does, too,” he says, and it sounds like an admission or a concession somehow. His eyes are on his plate now and his mouth is down-turned. All of the self-righteousness seems to have escaped him like steam from a teakettle.

“Then why doesn’t he get a ring and have to make a deal with his dad?” I press but my mom springs into action.

“Georgia,” she admonishes, reminding me with her eyes that Alistair is a guest and as Leigh’s first boyfriend,an especially honored guest, and I should, therefore, leave him alone. She turns to Leigh and Alistair, all smiles. “I think the idea of a ball is lovely.” She steers the conversation toward their classes at school like a skilled sailor navigating us out of choppy seas.

After dinner I go up to my room and sit on my bed with Teeny, the semi-feral almost zebra-striped cat everyone else fears because she will bite without provocation. Hard.

I kind of admire that.

I try to read and forget the major feats of hypocrisy I’ve witnessed in the last forty-eight hours, from tree-huggers eating meat to Michael blowing me off after winking at me to Alistair preaching against lust and leering at my sister’s ass. I also try to shrug off the ironic awareness that while Alistair Colwin is obviously a sexist dork, he is downstairs watching a morally unobjectionable movie with his girlfriend, while I am doing homework on a Friday night, reading Hamlet, in fact, just to ensure that the whole night is a laugh riot.

So which one of us is the dork, really?

I wonder what Michael is doing tonight that's so much better than sitting in a dark movie theater with me and Tori and Trey. And where he gets off blowing me off and acting like he’s the most important and upright person at Longbourne High School when he’s only at LHS because he got kicked out of the Pemberley School for some reason. There's much speculation about it, but maybe it’s no mystery after all; maybe he became so insufferable that even the snottiest prep school in New England bounced him out on his preppie little posterior.

Not that I think about Michael’s posterior, preppie or otherwise.

Or any other part of his anatomy.

I twist in my own psychic spin cycle for a while until I get up and go to the bathroom, where Leigh is brushing her teeth. She’s dressed like a sister wife again, in a flannel nightgown with her hair in a long braid, and she turns to me after she spits